The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) is a standard, web service, and XML-based interface to discover, describe, execute, and connect or chain various data and analysis processes. WPS is geared towards geospatial processes, but is generic enough to support any type of process.
Currently, chaining of WPSs together is a lengthy manual process that is difficult to debug due to nested XML. It is also difficult to visualize the entire workflow of WPSs. Hence, there is a need to simplify those processes and create a user interface for connecting the services easily with integrated error-checking to ensure the outputs and inputs are connected to the right data types and to visualize the entire workflow. There is also a need to automate the creation of applications (commonly referred to as “apps”) from such WPS workflows.
Existing systems do not automate the workflows or the creation of apps from the workflows. Existing systems do not provide user interfaces with integrated error-checking that enable linking of the services and/or allow a user to visualize the entire WPS workflow graphically. For example, GeoServer™ is a software server that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. It also provides a mechanism to host WPS. GeoServer provides a capability to linearly create a nested chain but does not enable a user to get a complete look at the workflow process in one graphical view.
ESRI Model Builder™ is a desktop application that allows a user to create and execute models created from various tools within the ESRI ArcGIS toolbox of geographic information system (GIS) tools. The model itself can then be available as a tool itself in the toolbox. However, this is limited to working with the ESRI GIS tools and within the ESRI environment.
In Chapter 24 from the book entitled “Development of a WPS Process Chaining Tool and Application in a Disaster Management Use Case for Urban Areas” (authors are: B. Stollberg and A. Zipf, both are from Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Germany, copyrighted 2009), the concept of developing a desktop application to perform WPS chaining is discussed. This concept is, however, limited in its application and does not provide a web-based interface or other needed features such as auto creation of apps.
There is also currently GeoChaining capability that is part of the GeoSquare capability developed by LIESMARS, Wuhan University. This GeoChaining capability also creates models based on geospatial services. However, this implementation is also limited to a desktop-based capability without the web-based interface or other needed capabilities and features such as auto creation of apps. A recent slide presentation entitled, “Building Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for GIScience through Geospatial Service Web”, which is available online (authors of the slide presentation are: Jianya Gong, Tong Zhang, Huayi Wu, and Yandong Wang from LIESMARS, Wuhan University, Conference: CyberGIS '12 at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, dated Aug. 7, 2012), provides a description of the capability.
Currently, there is no automated way to create analysis applications without writing code. Accordingly, there is a need for users such as analysts to easily make their analysis workflows available to end users without having another person (i.e., a middleman) write code for a graphical user interface that can interact with the said workflows.
With the rise in popularity and widespread adoption of advanced smart phones and their associated platforms, apps have become a popular paradigm for creating simple, intuitive, and powerful tools accessible through a variety of computer form factors. Apps and their associated app stores are reflective of an on-demand environment where information and tools need to be timely, customizable, and responsive. There are well over 1 million apps in Apple, Microsoft, and Google's app stores. Unfortunately, users cannot access the processes that make up these apps.